So my friend asked me to build him a computer this weekend. His specifications were:
And we aimed for £500. He already had two hard drives and two DVD-RW from a previous machine, and we managed to salvage 2Gb of DDR2 for him to sell.
We ended up purchasing an Athlon X4 and a HD5770, along with the Antec Mini-Skeleton; making sure that we got a mATX motherboard so that it would all fit.
My worry began when the boxes arrived; my friend was euphoric at the sight of all the components, but I noticed that the Antec box was smaller than I had expected. When we opened it up and I noticed it already had a tiny PSU built in I worried further, and we soon realised the nice 600W PSU we had bought wouldn't fit in the case at all. The motherboard fit though, so I began to hope that the onboard PSU would be sufficient, and we could RMA the other PSU. However the HD5770 didn't fit under the Skeleton's fan at all. It wasn't even close.
So after all that we put the components together on his wooden table, to prove to him that once we had the case all would be well, and indeed the machine ran first time and was remarkably quick. Now we shall just await the arrival of the larger Skeleton.
It was a shame that the graphics card wouldn't fit, as we were unable to find anything online detailing which graphics cards might or might not fit. It was only once we had it that we found the small print saying 'half-height PCI-e cards only'.
- Quad core
- Quiet
- 4Gb of RAM
- Funky looking case
- Medium to High Gaming Capabilities
And we aimed for £500. He already had two hard drives and two DVD-RW from a previous machine, and we managed to salvage 2Gb of DDR2 for him to sell.
We ended up purchasing an Athlon X4 and a HD5770, along with the Antec Mini-Skeleton; making sure that we got a mATX motherboard so that it would all fit.
My worry began when the boxes arrived; my friend was euphoric at the sight of all the components, but I noticed that the Antec box was smaller than I had expected. When we opened it up and I noticed it already had a tiny PSU built in I worried further, and we soon realised the nice 600W PSU we had bought wouldn't fit in the case at all. The motherboard fit though, so I began to hope that the onboard PSU would be sufficient, and we could RMA the other PSU. However the HD5770 didn't fit under the Skeleton's fan at all. It wasn't even close.
So after all that we put the components together on his wooden table, to prove to him that once we had the case all would be well, and indeed the machine ran first time and was remarkably quick. Now we shall just await the arrival of the larger Skeleton.
It was a shame that the graphics card wouldn't fit, as we were unable to find anything online detailing which graphics cards might or might not fit. It was only once we had it that we found the small print saying 'half-height PCI-e cards only'.
We actually bought from a different e-tailer because OcUK didn't have some of the parts he wanted; if only we had bought from OcUK and noticed that! 
